Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
A century ago, on 4th of May 1926, Britain experienced its first and only General Strike with the support of the General Council of Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.). Today, it is estimated that 1.7 million employees, mostly working in heavy industry and the transportation sector, joined 1.2 million coal miners already on strike. The origins of the General Strike lay in the Great War.
For four years, Britain (along with France and German, it must be added) sank most of its resources into the War effort. Industry was mobilised to focus on war production as the top priority. Consequently, many British goods that had been produced in peace time for export were simply not being produced. This led to a decline in the U.K.’s international trade and the profitability of the country generally. With free trade curtailed, industry increasingly relied upon the taxpayer for support, but more worryingly, it was to suffer from the long-term loss of its export markets. Put bluntly, the countries no longer able to import British products looked around for alternative suppliers, and they mostly settled upon the United States of America to fill the void.
In the period following their Civil War, the U.S.A. had experienced the most rapid period of economic expansion in human history, which we know today as the Gilded Age. By 1914, they were the only country to seriously rival Britain in terms of manufactured goods and, most importantly, they did not join the Great War until 6th April 1917.
Immediately after the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, Britain experienced a brief economic boom. Factories returned to commercial production and the newly demobilised workforce flooded back to their workplaces. If anything, out of necessity, industry had become more efficient during wartime and the U.K. was now able to increase its rate of production above that of the pre-war era. Private capital that had been under-invested during the conflict started returning to the market, and the shipbuilding industry experienced a demand to replace lost ships. Unfortunately, economic confidence did not last long, as it soon became apparent that many of Britain’s overseas customers had been lost and were unlikely to return.
The resulting economic contraction of 1920-1921 was not only experienced in the United Kingdom. The United States also suffered but Britain was hit hardest. G.D.P. fell by 22% between August 1920 and May 1921. Eventually, unemployment reached 17%. The “Roaring Twenties” was an American phenomenon. In Britain and on the European Continent, the decade delivered only hardship and recession.
The British coal industry was strongly affected by the events of the post-war era. Under the terms of the 1924 Dawes Plan, which aimed to cure hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic, Germany was granted the right to pay off her war reparations by way of exporting “free coal” from the Ruhr to France and Italy. The British mine owners could only respond by cutting prices. Then, in 1925, the Chancellor, Winston Churchill, announced that the U.K. would return to the gold standard. Sterling became strong, which further hindered exports. Faced with the prospect of making large scale redundancies in the coal fields, the mine owners, often portrayed in socialist mythology as callous monsters, decided that they would try to save miners jobs, but would require them to take a pay cut from £6 per week to £3 and 18 shillings. There was also the prospect of the miners having to work longer hours.
The miner’s union, with the T.U.C.’s support, rejected these proposals and devised the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” Unfortunately, they did not develop an alternative policy capable of maintaining current wage levels whilst ensuring that all pits remained open. Many union members, even at this time, supported the nationalisation of the coal industry, but it could not be denied that this would only transfer the burden of an increasingly unprofitable industry onto the taxpayer. At this stage, the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, became involved.
Baldwin proposed that the State would subsidise coal miners’ wages at current levels for the following nine months. Meanwhile, the Government would establish a Royal Commission, chaired by Liberal M.P. Herbert Samuel, to consider the best way forward for the coal industry. For a few months, steam was taken out of the issue and the shrewd Baldwin, rather like Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the early 1980s, was able to secretly start building supplies in preparation for a long strike.
The calm atmosphere instantly evaporated on 10th March 1926, when the Samuel Commission report was published. The bottom line was that the report recommended that State wage subsidies should end and that miners’ salaries should be cut by 13.5%. Whilst economically entirely realistic, the country had returned to square one. Unsurprisingly, the trades unions rejected the proposals and talks to stop industrial action failed. On 1st May, the T.U.C. announced that a General Strike “in defence of miners’ wages and hours” would commence two days later.
The British political world was plunged into turmoil. Whilst the Conservative Government attempted mediation behind the scenes, Winston Churchill (who always throve in the wake of crisis) started planning his editorship of the British Gazette, a new state-owned daily newspaper that would be published whilst the print unions refused to publish the usual Fleet Street dailies. Churchill ended up writing a large percentage the British Gazette’s copy himself but by the end of the strike, it was selling over two million copies each day.
The Labour Party, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, were not unequivocal supporters of the strike. Still reeling from the Zinoviev letter matter at the 1924 General Election, they were desperate not to be tarnished with an image of militancy. There was also fear that the Communist Party of Great Britain, only established in 1920 and now working actively inside the trades unions, would grow on the back of the General Strike and start to eclipse the more established Labour Party.
On 4th May, the country’s public transport network came to a halt. In an era before widespread car ownership, most people were severely restricted from getting to their workplace. The following day, the Government established a force of special constables under the title of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to support the official police in maintaining order. There was no shortage of volunteers who came forward to join the new organisation, which was a matter of great relief to the Government, who had specifically excluded members of the fringe British Fascisti group, run by dotty spinster Rotha Linton-Orman, from joining. On the next day, 6th May, buses in London started moving again, with volunteers filling the places of striking drivers and conductors.
The closest that the General Strike came to violence came on 8th of May, when the army were sent into the Port of London docks to prevent picket lines from curtailing food from leaving the ships and warehouses. Thankfully, apart from heckles from the strikers and a few items of food thrown at passing army lorries, the conflict came to nothing. Throughout the General Strike, there were very few clashes on the picket lines, and one was more likely to see Police playing football with the strikers than either side forming barricades.
Slowly, day by day, strikers across the country started drifting back to work. The T.U.C. could see the writing on the wall and on 12th May, the General Strike was called off. The coal miners continued their strike until November, but some regions, notably Nottinghamshire (another parallel with the 1984-1985 strike), returned to work long before that date.
The General Strike has gone down as a milestone in British history, but it achieved nothing for the coal industry workforce. The absence of union policy alternatives to the Samuel Report recommendations ultimately doomed the strike before it started. They had nothing positive to campaign for and just demanded that their wages be maintained at earlier levels, when it was clear that to do so would bankrupt the industry.
In contrast, Baldwin played a master hand in 1926. He firstly portrayed himself as the conciliator, willing to subsidise wages whilst the Royal Commission deliberated, whilst secretly preparing for the worst. Then, when the strike began, he and his Chancellor, Winston Churchill, proved themselves as deft organisers of both public opinion and maintaining essential public services. Finally, after the T.U.C. capitulated, Baldwin returned to conciliation, with the Government announcing that there would be no victimisation of former strikers. Ultimately, the General Strike had been little more than a futile gesture by the trades union movement.